iPod: Sort Your Albums by Year of Release

Not that long ago, I was asked by a commenter if I had any suggestions for getting the iPod to sort albums chronologically. By default, the iPod’s behavior is to sort albums alphabetically by title. In iTunes, there’s the option to sort “Album By Year” but the iPod features no such function.

At the time, I didn’t have much of an answer for him other than to put the albums in a playlist and just listen to the songs in chronological order. But in an interesting twist, the pixels in that reply were barely dry before Apple released version 1.3 of the firmware for 5G iPods. After some further discussion, this trick was discovered:

The most noticeable change in firmware 1.3 is the application of iTunes’ “smart sorting” (ignoring “a” “an” and “the”), including recognition of iTunes’ custom “Sort Fields” (Sort Album, Sort Composer), for Album and Composer. The Sort fields allow you to enter any text that you want and iTunes/iPod will use that to order the list of items, while displaying the text from the actual field.

Using the Sort Album field, you can easily put albums in whatever order you like. For example, you could put the Halo number of Nine Inch Nails releases in the Sort Album field to have all items, including singles and remix albums, displayed in the order they were released.

For basic chronological sorting, just put the year in the Sort Album field and voila, the iPod will show the album title, but they will be ordered by the year.

UPDATE: The previous version of this post recommended putting the year of the album in the Sort Album field. This, however, effectively changes the name of the album within iTunes’ logic, making it group all albums of the same year together.

The revised method is to simply prepend the year to the album name in the Sort Album field. This way, each album gets a unique identifier that still sorts by year.

Additional caveat: this tip has the potential (there have been mixed reports) to reorder the listings of the “Album” browser, as the Sort Album field may be applied to it. So if you ever use the iPod’s Album View, keep this in mind. See the discussion in the comments for effects and solutions.

For this demonstration, I’ve selected Daft Punk’s three studio albums:

Homework (1997)

Discovery (2001)

Human After All (2005)

As you can see in the image at top, the default behavior is to display the albums in alphabetical order, with Discovery as the first. How do we fix that?

click to enlarge

In iTunes, get info on the first song of the album.

Click the Sorting tab.

Enter the year of the album then the album name into Sort Album field

Click OK.

Select all the songs on the album

Right-click/Control-click and select Apply Sort Field > Same Album

Repeat for as many albums as you care to customize

When you next update your iPod, the new data will take effect and the albums will be sorted by release date.

Daft Punk albums sorted chronologically.

This process works for any 5G iPod that has been updated to firmware version 1.3 (and I assume iPods/iPhones released subsequently) So if you haven’t updated yours, hop to it and then get customizing.

UPDATE 2: As mentioned in the comments, if you have an artist who released two or more albums in the same year, there are two options you can use to sort them appropriately:

If you know the more specific album release date, you can prepend that to the album name.Example: If one album was released in March and another in October, use 2008-03 and 2008-10 .

If you don’t know the date, you can order them with a number.Ex: 2008-1 , 2008-2 and so on.

Thanks. That’s exactly what I did initially but, in iTunes and on my iPod, it did not completely ‘undo’ the resorting of the albums; albums (all in the same year) were not being grouped together both on my computer and iPod. After restarting iTunes and doing a soft reset on the iPod, however, the ‘undo’ was applied completely and everything was back to how it was before I tried to show the albums sorted by year.

Still not sure why the sorting didn’t work though. Would be interested in what anyone else finds – try applying the ‘sort’ as described above for multiple albums that came out in the same year by the same artist (e. g., Elton John’s Madman Across the Water and Tumbleweed Connection both came out in 1971; when I applied this they appeared in the entire album structure in the appropriate place by year but the songs from the two albums were mixed together – there were other examples as well).

I was sorting by year and in the “sort album” tab i put the year then the month of its release and it organized it for me.

For example, the beatles had the “magical mystery tour” and “Sgt. peppers” album released in 1967 soo in the the ‘sort album’ tab, for “Sgt. peppers” i typed in “1967 June” and for the other album i put “1967 November”. It worked for me

What can I do if I have albums from different artists with the same name? For example, I have three different bands with “Live at the Fireside Bowl” and “MTV Unplugged” — how can I prevent them from all using the same year when sorting?

Cool. I think I knew about this once but can’t remember if I got around to trying it or not.

My biggest issue with sorting right now is that albums with songs by mutiple artists get split when updating to the ipod (vers 1.3). In iTunes, I’ve edited the sort artist tag to display them correctly, but this doesn’t transfer to the ipod. Very annoying.

For example: A David Bowie best of containing ‘under pressure’ by David Bowie and Queen is tagged as David Bowie, but on the ipod it looks like this:

David Bowie
David Bowie and Queen
David Bowie

and don’t even get me started on Robbie Williams’ Swing when you’re winning.

What I do to sort this out is that I put the second artist on the song name field instead of the artist field. For example, I would tag it like this:

Title: Under Pressure (ft. Queen)
Artist: David Bowie
Album: The Best of David Bowie

This leaves you only with one entry for David Bowie when you browse your iPod by Artist.

Also, I think your iPod looks like this:

David Bowie
David Bowie and Queen
David Bowie

because there is at least one song that has the artist name slightly different or is tagged differently than the others. For example a blank space after “Bowie”, or you have something on the “Artist Album” field. Make sure that all of them are tagged exactly the same and it should disappear.

This problem has annoyed me for ages, so thank for the solution. I have hundreds of albums with this problem, so I wrote the following VB script to sort the lot of them out at once. BTW it stopped working when I upgraded to Itunes 8 (Damn!):

FOR i = 1 TO numTracks step +1
SET currTrack = tracks.Item(i)
‘is this a file track?
IF currTrack.Kind =ITTrackKindFile THEN
IF currTrack.Year > 0 THEN
currTrack.SortAlbum = currTrack.Year & ” ” & currTrack.Album
END IF
END IF
NEXT

This works greatly if you’re not going to browse your iPod by Album. When you go to Music -> Albums you will see that all of your albums will be sorted by year. When you have 1.500+ albums, like I do it’s very impractical and unless you know the release date of every single album you have it’s going to be very difficult to find. Unless, of course, that you never browse your iPod like this, which in case will work wonders for you.

Yes, this is what I have been doing until I found out this also does not work correctly.

It may work nice when viewing albums in iTunes, but when you look at “albums” on your iPod, it lists those sorted albums under the letter/number that it is sorted with.

For instance, look under “albums” on your iPod and look for the album “Californication”. It should be under “C” but it is now under “R” since you sorted it by “Red Hot Chili Peppers 1999 Californication”.

Hi Fred, the Sort Album function is apparently global in nature. Changing the sort name seems to apply everywhere an album is listed. The iPod follows the same behavior whether you’re browsing Artists > Beatles > Albums or the full list of albums. Because of the way the software works, there’s no way to specify one type of sorting for one situation and a different type for another.

For me personally, it’s not a problem because I rarely if ever browse by album; I tend to browse by artist first. But I can see how this can be annoying for those who do like to look at the album list.

I have an 80 Gb iPod classic. On iTunes my albums are all in order but on my iPod, under cover flow, some get thrown out of sequence and put at the end of the list. Example, I have every Metallica album they made and for the most part they’re all in order. But at the end of the list Garage, Inc & Garage Days are appearing there instead of with the rest of the Metallica albums. Same thing with a few Alice In Chains, Iron Maiden, Anthrax, etc. It goes through A-Z, then starts back at A with the ones it kicked out, and puts those in alphabetical order. I’m at my wits end! Please help!

After I got a new iPod classic 160GB, I tried to make it sort the albums by year for two days. And since I have over 25000 songs, and accordingly a few thousand albums, this wasn’t a good solution for me, it would take me a few days to make it work like that (and I would have to do it again if I would reinstall iTunes/windows). In the end I decided to mimic my folder structure, and to add the year to the start of the album name.

Since going through the 25k songs would be too time consuming manually too, I wrote scripts for the tag editor “Mp3tag” v2.50. For these scripts to work, you need to have the entries for year and album in the tags. If the year is missing, it will leave the album name as it is, and it also won’t write if the year has some trash sequence as entry, which doesn’t start with 4 numbers.

To add the year to the Album name and making sure that the year tag actually consists out of at least 4 numbers (to not get a separating space at the start of the album if there is no year to be added, like it would have been with “%year% %album%” alone):

And now since we won’t be using an iPod until we die, or in case apple finally fixes this design flaw, here is the revert script. It removes the first 5 signs of the album name in case the first 4 are numbers and the whole name is longer than 5 signs (the 4 signs for the year and the separating space). That way it for example won’t touch the Beatles’ singles collection “1″ if there is no year attached to it. It also won’t touch an album called “1234″, and not even “12345″, or “1234a”, but if there is something like “123456″, you have a problem, I can’t think of any albums though that start with 4 numbers and are at least 6 signs long, so the risk should be minimal.